Before people had telescopes, comets were frightening objects of awe and wonder that seemed to appear out of nowhere, blazed brightly in the sky, then vanished as quickly as they came. Older Than Dirt, the "falling stars" mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh were possibly a reference to comets or meteor showers. For thousands (and perhaps tens of thousands) of years, they were seen by civilizations around the world as omens of good and ill, pronouncing the deaths of kings, horrible disasters, and military victories. Western civilizations have generally categorized them as harbingers of evil, but the universal consensus is that when a comet appears, something momentous is happening, enough so that the heavens themselves have taken notice.

In 1705, astronomer Edmund Halley noticed that the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 all had the same orbit and period. Suspecting that the three were actually the same comet, Halley predicted not only that it would appear again in 1758, but in what part of the sky, and in what orbit. It appeared exactly when and where he said it would, and Halley's Comet not only acquired a name, but put an end to the thought that a comet was some supernatural envoy of doom.

Be that as it may, comets remain cool, and they are still used in media as the first, last and only suitable omen for truly world-shaking events. Such as said comet coming straight at you...

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

In Space Carrier Blue Noah, the aliens rain down surveillance cameras disguised as meteors onto planet Earth, to scope out whether the planet is worth invading.

In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, such a comet indicates the imminent fulfillment of Jim Cook's prophecy. For bonus points, it appears to turn and fly straight towards him several times, causing alarm, though this is only an illusion, albeit part of the prophecy, and the comet is never the real threat.

Lifeforce. The arrival of Halley's Comet foretells doom for London, as it contains an alien spaceship that carried space vampires. Discussed, as the characters mention that the appearance of Halley's Comet has been considered a warning of disaster for centuries, possibly because seeing it meant the alien ship within was near enough to allow the vampires to reach Earth and feed.

The romantic comedy Wimbledon actually has this: Paul Bettany's character seems to take on l33t tennis skills only while a comet is in the sky. And yes, he wins Wimbledon, because everyone knows it will take the intervention of God for an Englishman to ever win that tournament again.

In The Brainiac, a comet carries a magician who escaped execution by transporting himself there and who then returns to earth 300 years later as a monster with forked tongue which he uses to suck peoples brains out.

Dragonheart: A New Beginning features a prophecy where an ancient evil will take hold of the land using a dragon's heart when a two-tailed comet blazes across the sky.

Used in Deep Impact, justifiable as the comet is set to impact Earth and bring another Extinction-Level Event.

In End of Days the appearance of a comet above the full moon known as "The Eye of God" by Vatican astronomers, and it's the sign of the prophesied birth of the woman that will give birth to the anti-Christ.

In Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, the Conqueror Star is a highly visible comet whose coming is said to portend the fall of empires. Given the limited amount of information presented in the story itself, it's hard to say whether it actually has supernatural powers, but its periodicity is certainly very odd.

The Red Star in Dragonriders of Pern is a captured planet in an elongated (comet-like) orbit. When you can see it in the sky, it means that it's nearby... and has dragged a bunch of frozen organisms from the Oort Cloud to the inner solar system with it. These organisms, upon entering Pern's atmosphere, become the Threads. They eat any organic material they can. Crops, wood, grass, fungi... people...

In one Animorphs book the characters have traveled to the time of the dinosaurs and see a comet in the sky. Cassie mentions that humans used to believe that comets were a bad omen, and Ax says that Andalites had a similar superstition. Of course, said comet turns out to be the comet that killed the dinosaurs.

A comet pops up during the siege of a town in Colas Breugnon, and is taken to be a bad omen, though no one can agree on what it is an omen of or to whom it is bad.

The very old story, Hector Servadac, has the titular hero and several others accidentally travelling into space on pieces of the Earth ripped away by collision with a comet and having to survive while forming a plan to get back to Earth when the comet returns near it again. Somehow, nobody else on Earth notices anything. Crosses over with Science Marches On.

A red comet appears in the sky early in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series — unusually, the characters aren't universally filled with dread; several of them decide the comet shows divine favour for their side (Daenerys thinks it's a sign that will lead her khalasar to safety; the Lannisters believe it is a sign of good fortune for their family and especially Joffrey; etc.) At the end of A Feast for Crows it seems to be confirmed that it's a part of the prophecy of the Prince Who Was Promised.

Also used by Martin in "The Plague Star," one of his "Haviland Tuf" stories (chronologically the first); the recurring "star" is actually a (huge) derelict starship automated to bombard a planet with bioweapons.

If this is found after the plague star has waned, as the night-hunters say it will, do not be deceived. This is no fair world, no world for life. Here is death, and plagues beyond numbering. The plague star will shine again.

In War and Peace, the Great Comet of 1811, still visible well into 1812, is taken as a harbinger of Napoleon's invasion in June of that year.

Live Action TV

In Babylon 5, the Brakiri solar system contains only one comet with a period of 200 years. The comet is considered a death omen (and the focus of the season five episode "Day of the Dead"). As a result, the Brakiri don't even like comets to be mentioned.

In Beauty and the Beast, a comet was blazing in the sky the night billionaire Elliot Burch is murdered by operatives of his rival, Gabriel. Father marks the occasion by quoting Shakespeare: "When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

Doctor Who: In Silver Nemesis there is a comet with a period of 25 years that, according to the Doctor, really does bring misfortune: it's actually an alien superweapon that somehow (ahem) wound up in a solar orbit. He cites the the two World Wars and the assassination of JFK as the results of the last three times it came near Earth.

Game of Thrones: red comet during Season 2 coincides with birth of dragons and return of Magic.

In the third episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, "When Knowledge Conquered Fear", Neil Degrasse Tyson explains the origins of this trope and how it was based in superstition and ignorance of how the solar system worked. He goes on to tell an absolutely epic version of how Edmund Halley went about utterly crushing this superstition. It ended with Halley's "prophecy" that not only would one particular comet return in 50 years, but accurately and correctly predicting where in the sky it would appear, and how long it would be visible, and how "Halley's Comet" became the best known comet in the history of the world.

Mythology & Religion

In a rare example of a comet being a good omen, some scholars believe that the Star of Bethlehem was one. Others discount this because of said stigma of comets being doom omens, instead assuming that the event was an alignment of several stars.

Tabletop Games

In the Dungeons & Dragons adventure module X2 Castle Amber, the appearance of a blazing red comet over Averoigne causes an NPC to become a deadly monster.

"King-Killer Star" of Forgotten Realms. It did cause damage, and turned out to be just a random comet with right period chosen as the trigger condition for a magical device — until the latter was "hacked".

In the Shadowrun supplements The Year of the Comet and Wake of the Comet, the passing of Halley's Comet in 2061 greatly increased the magic level on Earth, which caused SURGE (Sudden Recessive Gene Expression) mutations in (meta)humans, animals and plants, the re-appearance of the dragon Ghostwalker and natural disasters in the Asia that brought down the Japanese Empire.

Warhammer: The presence of a twin-tailed comet is often seen as an omen to the people of The Empire, due to the legend that their founder Sigmar's birth was heralded by it's appearance. This is not always seen as a good omen, however, especially to the city of Mordheim, which was hit by one.

In the Alliances expansion for Magic: The Gathering, General Varchild saw a comet which she believed meant that she was to conquer the barbarian tribes as a part of a manifest destiny for her people. So she took her army and began the slaughter.

Video Games

In Ultima V, each of the Shadowlords has their own comet; if you have a telescope you can determine which city they're in by looking for where the comets are.

A random event in Europa Universalis involves a comet or meteor appearing and the superstitious peasants being concerned enough that your country loses stability. Players complained that the event only had one option, so in each major update the devs added a new option...which also reduced stability. Victoria 2 also has a Comet Sighted event, but because it's set in more enlightened times the comet gives you research points instead.

Illusion of Gaia's entire plot is influenced by a comet that returns every few hundred years. Each visit affects all life on Earth in unexpected ways, although the end results thus far (that tend to linger even until the next visitation) are usually the same (mutations, destroyed civilizations, famine, etc.).

In Chrono Trigger, the "Red Star" that heralds the end of the dominance of the Reptites and beginning of the ascension of mankind as the dominant species is actually Lavos, and he not only heraldsthe change, he causes it.

In Strife, the plot is triggered (some time before the events of the game) by a comet striking the Earth. The last levels reveal that the "comet" was almost certainly The Entity's spaceship crash-landing — probably deliberately.

Metroid Prime is all about this. The first two games are about saving the planet after the comet lands and starts mutating everything / creating an interdimensional rift. The third game has 5: One in the intro sequence that you need to activate an Anti-air cannon in time, three more that already landed and you're trying to fix, and the final one is inside the Genius Loci planet that makes these to spread its influence.

In chapter 2 of The Witcher 2 a comet is visible in the skies, even at daytime, this is during an endless spectral battle is taking place.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sozin's Comet grazes the sky every 100 years to grant firebenders the ability to, well, shoot a lot more fire. A century before the series begins, it provided Fire Lord Sozin and his army the strength for a near all-encompassing genocide of the Air Nomads. The impending doom it will bring if Fire Lord Ozai is allowed to use it makes our heroes' mission much more urgent. Near the climax, Ozai decides use it to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground.

Adventure Time: The Catalyst Comets, terrible events happen whenever they are near. However, this is averted in "The Comet", where it is revealed Catalyst Comets are sentient, and are more of agents of change rather than malevolent forces.

A comet was seen in the sky shortly after the death of Gaius Julius Caesar. Rather than being seen as a bad omen, the comet was believed to be proof that Julius Caesar had ascended to godhood after his murder.

Of course, his great-nephew and adopted son Emperor Augustus was gaining power and certainly encouraged this story, meaning he could call himself son of a god.

"On the very days of my Games a comet was visible for seven days in the northern part of the sky. It was rising about an hour before sunset, and was a bright star visible from all lands." — Caesar Augustus

Tacitus mentions two comet sightings during the reign of the Emperor Nero. Nero was apparently so concerned about each of these two comet sightings (in the years 60 and 66 AD, respectively), thinking that they were omens foretelling the sudden end of his reign, that he had most of the Roman nobility massacred as a means to forstall assassination.

Just as an interesting aside, the comet in 66 AD was Halley's Comet.

Months prior to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Halley's Comet appeared in the sky. The Bayeax Tapestry records not only the appearance of the comet over the battle, but King Harold II of England being informed of the appearance of this ill-omen.

In 1996, amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek announced that he had found a "Saturn-like object" following the Hale-Bopp comet (closer examination, however, proved that no such object existed). Unfortunately, UFO enthusiasts everywhere latched on to the supposed "fact" that there was an alien spacecraft following the comet. Among the people who got sucked into this fantasy were the members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who chose the appearance of the comet as a signal for their mass suicide. They claimed they were "leaving their earthly bodies behind to travel to the spaceship" that was supposedly following the comet.

Mark Twain was born on November 30th, 1835, 20 days after the passing of Halley's Comet on November 10th. In 1909, he had stated, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." Twain passed away on April 21st, 1910, the day after Halley's Comet passed again.

Incidentally, the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet was met with some panic. Earth was set to pass through Halley's tail and it had recently been discovered that comet tails contain poisonous gas. While scientists of the time knew it was too diffuse to affect anyone, irresponsible journalists decided to run with the "all life on Earth is about to be wiped out by comet poison" angle. Even more sensationalistic reports suggested the comet was about to hit the Earth. Some enterprising individuals took advantage of the situation by selling "anti-comet pills" and " comet-protecting umbrellas". An episode of The Time Tunnel, titled "End of the World", depicts a highly inaccurate version of the panic.

According to the Florentine Codex, a comet appeared over the Aztec Empire not long before Hernán Cortés arrived.

Older Than Dirt: Mentioned on ancient Chinese oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty. A comet was also among the omens thought to have foreboded the fall of the Shang dynasty by the victory of King Wu of Zhou over King Zhou of Shang, c. 1050 BCE.

Even Older Than Dirt: There is a painting of a comet on a cliff wall in central Australia that is estimated to have been created some 9000 to 10,000 years ago. It is surrounded by painted figures of animals, and some paleoanthropologists believe that the comet was taken as an omen for lucky hunting.

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